Sorrow, Magic and Bathtub-Shaped Paradise in Beasts of the Southern Wild

“In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.”

I tend to watch movies with the eye of one who deems themself some not-so-humble form of an “intellect.” But after watching Benh Zeitlin’s recent film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, I have found myself the fool.

One could watch this movie (and many have) and marvel at its potential messages about the “beasts” of Southern Americana – race, poverty, or a myriad of other sociopolitical issues. Until the last shot of the movie, this is how my own interpretation unfolded. However, with eyes full of tears in the last beautiful instant, I realized that wisdom to be in vain – that maybe “they” aren’t the metaphorical beasts. Maybe I am.

Without giving any spoilers that aren’t relatively evident from the trailer, the film follows a six-year old girl, Hushpuppy, and her father, Wink, as they navigate their peculiar world – a commune on an island in the Gulf called the Bathtub. Initially, we see the Bathtub as a sort of fantastical Neverland, where every day is a holiday. The father and daughter live on a farm and tend to their animals with an almost spiritual authority. Sound familiar? The world outside of the island is the “dry world” where “they ain’t got none of what we got. They only got holidays once a year. They got fish stuck in plastic wrappers. They got their babies stuck in carriages.” This sterile description of the dry world presents a paradox, as compared to the Bathtub – which is utterly primitive, despite the symbolic for cleansing connotations in its name.

The initial glowing cinematography and commanding jazz riffs captivate and draw us into this myth-like society. While seemingly impoverished, the people of the Bathtub milk life to its very dredges. The setting is both oddly familiar and, undoubtedly, completely foreign. Here is a place where freedom reigns and adults run wild with childlike invigoration, living off of the land, so close to nature that we feel like we too could put our ears to the cold static of the television screen and hear the wild thumping heart of it all. We long to be there, with fire in our hands, tearing through the cobalt night – our faces uplifted, our hearts at peace.

“Everybody loses the thing that made them. The brave men stay and watch it happen.”

But a Deep Sorrow quickly interrupts the utopian microcosm. Throughout the film, Hushpuppy ever seeks the approval of her father. Most notably, she waits in a cardboard box inside her house (which has caught fire) to see if he would come to save her. He does. But afterwards she rebels against him nonetheless, hitting him on the chest saying, “I hope you die. And after you die I’ll go to your grave and eat birthday cake all by myself.” This seemingly backwards visual, eating birthday cake on a grave, reminds me of Christmas Eve at my church growing up – where the kids throw Jesus (a man who was born with the sole purpose of dying) a birthday party. There’s cake and laughing and singing and joy for the Deep Magic that happened over this man’s grave.

After Hushpuppy hits Wink, he drops to the ground from a heart attack. Instantly, we see shots of ice caps melting, and beasts, aurochs (who’ve been preserved in ice since the beginning), thaw and awaken. Hushpuppy flees from the scene where her father lies, runs to the water and yells, “I think I broke something!” This violent schism, and inciting incident, also presupposes its resolution – a birthday cake.

As if ignited by Hushpuppy’s rebellion, a pack of aurochs is on the move to the Bathtub just as an apocalyptic storm – a hurricane (reminiscent of Katrina) – falls down upon them. Simultaneously, we discover that Wink’s blood is “eating itself,” and he slowly begins to die as the tempest nears. Most of the island’s inhabitants retreat from the encroaching wrath, but not Hushpuppy and Wink. They dig their heels into the soggy ground and ride it out, the aurochs nearing by the minute.

After the storm passes, the Bathtub is left completely submerged in water. Wink, Hushpuppy, and the few other survivors try to continue living out the glory days of the Bathtub they knew before the storm – but the fish are rotting. Unclean. The water is polluted. They attempt to make do until area officials enforce a mandatory evacuation. And so these wild souls, who once reigned in Eden, are thrust into the dry world.

They are out of place and awkward among the people there – they just don’t fit. And I have to confess that I share that sentiment many of my days. To the tips of my toes, I sense some Deep Wrongness. But I also know that so much of what we understand is based in binaries. I know something is hot because I have been cold before. I know what love is because I’ve experienced it’s opposite. And I know that this Deep Sorrow is here because Paradise must lie beneath its gray and tattered surface.

There is an interesting parallel in the film between the aurochs and Hushpuppy. Initially, I thought it was their strength and fight. Why? Because that explanation sounds more inspiring. In reality, I think the aurochs are a representation of the ensuing Darkness. If these beasts are parallel to Hushpuppy, then she too is the embodiment of that Darkness. And if she is, then so am I. Hushpuppy later mourns, “I want to be cohesive.” And I think that childish cry holds a stinging truth – that we are not cohesive. We are separated. “Son of Man, can these bones live?”

But sin, no matter how rampant it may run, has not won the day. We see this in similarities between the beginning and end shots of the movie. In the title scene, Hushpuppy runs towards the camera with sparklers in her hands, nearly in the crucifix position, liberated and exuberant. In the end, after her world has been ravaged, she again marches toward the camera, framed identically to the title shot. But instead of sparklers, she valiantly waves a black funeral flag across the faint and stormy sky. And the small band of fellow survivors, with Hushpuppy at their helm, trudges across a drenched levy, violent waves breaching its surface, threatening to drown the very thing. And one has to wonder – will the encompassing sea consume them? Or is this damp pathway, across which the triumphant group advances, some divine passage leading to their magnificent and miraculous exodus. Marching through this new parched wilderness, they seem to say, “We know where we came from and, one fine day, we will go there again.”

The creator of Beasts of the Southern Wild poetically likened the narrative to a “jazz funeral.” Louis Armstrong once said, “The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the backyard on a hot night, or something said long ago.” Jazz is personal yet collaborative, it is dynamic, spontaneous, improvisational, intricate, and it utilizes the white keys and the black keys. The qualities of jazz, rooted in African American gospel, pour out the same complexities, struggles, yet beauty of what it means to live. And our lives seem to croon of magical things gone, of something wondrous said long ago. And so we eat birthday cake in their absence and we sing songs in the moonlight, in stubborn hope of life redeemed.

In the beginning of the film the Bathtub, in its full splendor, is extraordinary. Adults and children revel side by side. There is no discrimination or persecution. And remarkably, in the opening scene, through the billowy smoke of brilliant fireworks we see the dim shape of a cross in the ground – unwavering in all of the radiant chaos surrounding it. Just as in Eden, the schism that would come fiercely between Our Creator and us was always in The Plan. It wasn’t an accident. This shadow of the cross appears before the Deep Sorrow descends upon the Bathtub, just as God planned before the fall exactly what He would do to lift this crippling weight and rescue us. We can’t go back to Paradise. But I am comforted by the knowledge that it was always The Plan that we would have to depart from it. In some strange way, it means that there is a purpose for this time of longwaiting for that plan’s fulfillment. And for the time being, although sin and sorrow abound, He has carved a watery pathway through it all for us to move forward – although we may not always be sure of the way.

I am a beast of the wild, underwater and decaying. My blood, like Winks, is metaphorically eating itself. But deep in my bones lies an abiding assuredness that one day Some One will come to take all of that away. And the eyes of the blind will be opened. And the lame will leap like a deer. And a New World will come – a world where the sea spray soars like glad confetti, and it will dazzle and shine like Some Place I have never known or ever dared to imagine. Every day will be a holiday. And we will ride on floats in parades while we guzzle red wine, toast each other, laugh with unadulterated gladness, and stare like children in wonderment at the glittery blanket of fireworks pulsing across the sky. As if to say, “We know where we came from, and we know that, from nothing of our own deserving, we will never have to go there again.” We will eat birthday cake, and it will be a hell of an adventure.

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5 comments

This is a beautifully-written review. You captured the delight and wonder of this film very well. (I first saw it after someone commented it was the best film they saw at Cannes…pretty high praise.)

There’s just one theme you touch on, that I’m not sure I agree with (lots of discussion on the Internet about this, BTW).

I don’t think necessarily the film starts out utopian. The squalor, neglect and disarray of their lives is not intended as a commentary on goodness of their state. (In fact, it almost sounds like glamorization of poverty that anyone would “long to be there,” if you’re referring to a community without adequate education, nutrition or protection from floods, rather than the symbolic innocence you refer to later.)

I think instead the filmmaker makes it very clear (but without judgment) the Bathtub serves as the dark backdrop to hope. Good happens even in the roughest places. Here’s a child without much nurturing, in danger, often alone, at the mercy of the elements–at an age where that shouldn’t happen–and yet there is still so much resilience, love and light in that community. The film (to me) doesn’t say that life in the Bathtub is a holiday or paradise. The movie is more of a psalm of praise, that even in the wilderness, dwelling in the devastation of the Fall, we still make family, gather around fires, celebrate together, scratch out a living…salvage a place for ourselves in the world out of our collective wreckage.

Thanks for bringing attention to “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” It’s a difficult film in many ways, but has so much beauty and vision to it. I’m thankful the filmmakers were comfortable with ambivalence–not presenting an idealization or pat answers, but celebrating the human spirit rising despite the “Deep Sorrow and Wrongness.” So many reviewers have said it’s a hard film to explain, and it’s difficult to say why it is so wonderful. Maybe we’re not used to movies that both look, and love, so deeply, and unconditionally.

Maria, thanks so much for your thoughtful comments (I really enjoyed reading your own review)! The issues you address are exactly what I wrestled with as I watched the film – especially since it is so reminiscent of the immense poverty (particularly in that region of the South) that came to more public attention after Katrina. It is a difficult film to analyze in only a single light – and I certainly don’t mean to imply that I see it as strictly intentionally allegorical. But I do think there are stark plot points that are deeply parallel to the events of Eden – a daughter rebels against her father, a darkness descends, she is evicted from this place that she considers paradise, and is left to face a dark dry world. There are certainly A LOT of holes in a direct allegory here (as you said, life is NOT perfect in the Bathtub…by any stretch of the imagination). Call it glamorization though, but I can’t deny that I find there to be large elements of the society that are absolutely utopian (as described in my review). Why is this?

As a photographer, I notice that the first subject matter that almost every newbie shoots is a dirty sidewalk…or a rusty pole…or a decrepit house. It’s completely cliché. But why does anything become cliché? – Because we overuse it. Why are people consistently inspired to photograph rusty poles and dirty shoes? Do I think they’re exploiting these old destroyed things? No. I think there is something much more inherent in all of us that draws us to the broken because (whether we know it or not) it is there that we see a shadow, a reflection, of something when it “was.” Or maybe it’s because we see the manifestation of our very selves (no matter how high our education or how proper our nutrition) in the mold and the rot and the decay. And aren’t we all, in some way, shadows of Eden? I think this is what the movie’s portrayal of the Bathtub offers – a small, potent taste (at moments) of sweet elements of Paradise. Perhaps I’m tempted to glorify the Bathtub in this way because, as viewers, we experience the place through the eyes of a child.

I don’t mean to minimize or turn a blind eye to the very real social and humanitarian issues put forth by the film. But I do mean to emphasize that there is physical poverty and there is spiritual poverty. And all of us, without exception, fall into one or both of these categories.

Charlotte, those are great thoughts. I agree also that our fondness for the decayed, rusty, chaotic things is a desire to find beauty in brokenness. (I have a whole folder of “textures” from a trip to Europe.)

Actually, when I left the theater, I felt elated and more entranced with the imagery and emotion of the film. Some of my reservations came after reading the bell hooks article that was linked at the end of my review. Hearing how painful it was to her to watch the portrayal of the abuse and neglect made me look a little closer at the film.

A little later, someone posted an article (unrelated to the film) about America’s fascination with “ruin porn” (abandoned buildings, peeling walls, scenes of poverty made into aesthetic photography) and that also has informed my view on this film.

Unlike some of those who have harshly criticized this film, I don’t think “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is exploitative. The director and crew lived in New Orleans and spent time with people in the outer islands. It’s a very sensitive (but not sugar-coated) portrayal.

Director Behn Zeitlin says “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was intended as a mythical world filled with imaginary creatures and something like a fairytale community. I think seeing the film as poetry and magical realism (and less as a real-life depiction of gulf communities) allows the central truths (courage, resilience, the steadfastness of love, the wonder of childhood) to shine through the incredible cinematography, soundtrack, story and characterizations.

Side note: since it wasn’t in wide release, nor did it get tons of publicity in the mainstream media, many ended up watching this film based off rave reviews from friends or reviewers…and apparently, Oprah Winfrey saw it based off a recommendation from none other than President Obama.

What Eden are you referring to? There was rampant alcoholism, there was filth and abandonment, ill-health and bordeline physical abuse. I think you wanted the film to be something that it’s not. And thank goodnes, because this movie is better than the canned pheonix rising impression you somehow perceived. You also misinterpreted events to the point of being factually incorrect. You think they lived on a farm?

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